


Headwinds

by ackermom



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alcohol, Canon Compliant, During the Four Year Time Skip (Shingeki no Kyojin), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 03:02:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30048939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ackermom/pseuds/ackermom
Summary: He names the places they used to dream about— once, a wish; now, a list of tasks to fulfill, a rote memorization to measure their breaths and remind them of all the things they will lose if they fail. There will be answers overseas. There must be.
Relationships: Mikasa Ackerman/Armin Arlert
Comments: 10
Kudos: 59





	Headwinds

The laughter startles her. 

"No, no," comes the deep, humored tenor, low and murmuring in the night. "Not like that."

It brings Mikasa out of her reverie. It sounds distant at first, as if she is far away from everything else, floating in the air somewhere over the cliffs. But then she blinks, and the interior of the dimly lit tent warms up around her, coming back to life. The laugher is right there, the hum and smile of a late night conversation at the same table where she still sits, her back sore, folded up in her seat with an empty wine glass in her hand. She has one leg tucked under the other, and she moves her toes uncomfortably, wincing at the static in her nerves. She blinks again, then once more. The lights seem to burn over head, the cold blue and the flickering yellow. She turns her gaze to the others, who are crowded around the far end of the table, four of them with their chairs circled together, and the last bottle of red wine sitting between them with its last drops drying on the green lip. The flame of the lantern at their elbows dances as they laugh together. Over their heads, a lamp of silver crystal burns, strung from one end of the tent to the other with a thin, taut rope that holds the light in place above their heads, even as the night wind rustles the canvas walls that surround them. 

"Not like that," Onyankopon says again.

Mikasa blinks once more, and the faces of her comrades finally come into focus where they sit apart from her— their easy smiles, and the way they sit in their chairs, loose, with mouthfuls of wine lingering on their tongues, with their sleeves rolled up and the straps of their suspenders falling down the curve of their shoulders. Onyankopon's deep laugh resonates in each of his words as he presents a demonstration for them; he articulates his fingers into a complicated figure, folding them over one another carefully, and his smile moves infectiously through the others as they purse their lips and tilt their glasses back to stifle the tipsy giggles as he contorts his hands and holds them to the light. 

Their chuckles fall short when the great shadow of a swan appears on the far wall of the canvas tent. It dances above Mikasa's head; the flicker of light and shadow blinds her as it moves swiftly, crossing up and down over the part of her face that falls within the light of the lantern. She flicks her eyes upward toward the bird, squinting at it, and she watches as it dances, as he moves his hands in expert fashion to dip the neck of the bird. He croons a pitiful imitation call of the swan before he breaks into laughter again and the shadow falls from the wall, his hands coming apart. Someone gasps. Mikasa glances back; Sasha is leaning low over the table with her gaze fixated on the expression of Onyankopon's fingers, as if she hopes to decipher the trick by staring at it. 

"Isn't that what I was doing?" she exclaims, a complaint. The loose knot in her hair is coming undone over her shoulders. She frowns and turns her gaze to the others to ask again, "Isn't that what I was doing?!"

"I think you had your thumb in the way," Connie interjects. His mug of wine slams on the table as he leans in and fumbles with his own hands to demonstrate, elbowing Jean out of the way as he does. "Look, like this—"

"Hey, hey," Jean barks, his fingers now dripping with wine. 

"Oh, you'll live. It's like that— wait, is it like that?"

Sasha utters an exasperated sigh. "But how'd you get it to move so elegantly, Onyankopon?"

They squabble. Mikasa turns to the empty glass still grasped in her hand and lets their words fade away into the night. The conversation has long turned from strategy, when the sun fell over the cliffs and the first bottle of wine was uncorked for dinner before the maps and plans had hardly been swept away. She remembers finding her seat here among the others, and the casual talk of tactics over scallops and greens. But she does not recall when the candlelight fell so low, or for how long she has been sitting alone in the darkness on this side of the tent, idly circling her finger over the rim of the glass and thinking of nothing, dreaming of nothing. She remembers a game of dice after dinner and the chill wind of dusk as their intimate table saw silent departures into the cold night; their numbers grew smaller and, paradoxically, louder, as the strange tension eased and the wine loosened the knots in their stomachs. She pushes her glass onto the edge of the table, where specks of sand have settled into the uneven grain of the wood. They poke at her skin— tiny pricks tickling her palms, insignificant granules, hundreds of them on her fingers alone, and millions more on the shore beyond. Prickly, tingling, sticking to her skin. She sweeps them aside as best she can. 

She stays in her seat for a moment longer, stretching her toes in her boots and swallowing the dryness in her mouth. Their talk in the background is puerile, and comfortingly whimsical, as they arrange animals with their hands to tell stories; something about it reminds her of days past, when the only things that existed beyond the walls were titans. At least, that was as far as most people saw. 

The sea winds are rushing through the encampment when she steps outside. All the warmth rushes out of her— the heat from the wine, the candlelight, the hour or more passed softly on her own with her glass after a long day of decisions. The wind flushes through her body beneath the cold midnight sky where she finds herself, blinking into the blue darkness. Overhead, the moon, full, glows a dim white light on the cliffside that seems to illuminate the encampment as her eyes adjust to the darkness. She stands for a moment, appreciating the cold, the quiet, the harsh salt breeze stinging her skin as it blows through the camp. From around the corner then, she hears two more voices that she knows, mumbling plans into the night; she recognizes their shadows as they approach, contorting strangely around the side of the tent. She turns on her heel to avoid the captain and commander, an instinct that unsettles her stomach as she flees from their eyes. 

Mikasa takes to a familiar trail through the alleys of the cliffside encampment. At the end of the main row, between the dimly lit tents that echo with nighttime laughter, with card games, or the strum of a guitar, there it is, cold and blue— over the steep drop of the cliffs, the water, the sea, a deep midnight calling to her as the moon's silver face shimmers on its surface. It stretches beyond the horizon, a black so vast she wonders how it could ever end. The camp grows quiet nearer the cliff face, where the winds are stronger and the soldiers on watch shiver in the moonlight with shotguns tucked over their shoulders. But that is not the path Mikasa follows. She turns her face and heads right, down the furthest aisle, the one that leads to the port and beach. At the far end there, the songs and games of the idle hours are drowned out by the windy rustling of the harsh breezes coming in over the cliffs. The wind whips her hair across her forehead as she walks. In the distance, she can see the lights of the port on the water, and beneath the moon, she can make out the meandering slope that they will follow down to the water when their ship departs in a few days' time.

She stops there at the edge of the camp, standing just before a long canvas tent that lies quiet in the night, seemingly undisturbed; though from beneath the edges of the tent comes the faint yellow glow of a lantern, giving away the occupant's presence. But more than anything else, she is drawn in by the smell: fresh wood and fruit oil.

Another wind wails through the camp just as she ducks into the tent. Her boots trod strangely on the carpet laid out for a floor on the uneven grass; it moves beneath her steps, like water, like the waves. The flap of the tent falls down behind her, and at once, it is as if the rest of the night has disappeared, all the wind and noise fading away— as if she has stepped into another world, one that brings comfort in its warmth and silence.

He has his back to her. He does not look up when she enters, even though she knows he must have noticed. He seems enthralled in the task at hand, his head bent low as he works in the dim orange light and the sickly sweet air. Beneath the stroke of his brush, a wood, shining with oil, a part of it reflecting the dancing flames of the candlelight. Mikasa blinks a few times before she recognizes the outline of the sailboat, and then it appears before her all at once, a great body of wood arched to the top of the tent, its bow and stern resting on two tables at one end and the other; it seems to suck the air out of the room, and it keeps growing the longer she observes it, its detailing appearing in the darkness: the curvature of the boards, the whittled wood, and the sheen of the protective oil, glistening in the light of the candles. She finds herself moving towards the crafted vessel, her fingers suddenly trembling to touch— to run her hands over the shine of its curved wooden belly, or to tangle her fingers in the cotton sheets set neatly to the side, the open sails of the sea lying folded in a dark tent like a blanket to wrap her body in. 

The toe of her boot catches on the carpet. She steps back, taking a breath, suddenly feeling the red wine in her veins. She glances up. Armin is looking back at her. He does not stand straight; he hardly pauses in his work either, looking over his shoulder with a glass jar in one hand and his paintbrush in the other. Their eyes meet. His gaze is dim, as the shadows of the candlelight fall over his face. He does not seem surprised to see her again, and neither is she, to have found her way back here once more. 

Armin looks at her for a moment more. Then he turns back to the hull of the boat that looms over his head, and he resumes his work, one tender brushstroke at a time. 

She finds her breath again as the tent settles back into its quiet contentedness, and she moves in, stepping carefully on the carpet. She tugs at her scarf, to pull it away from her face in the close warmth, and she sees, as she moves slowly, taking small steps to circle the sailboat, that is it nearly finished. 

"Have they all gone to bed?" Armin asks without looking at her. 

She stops just before she reaches the hull, standing at the end opposite him with her admiring gaze turned towards the top of the tent. She chides herself, as she has to resist the little urge in her fingers to reach out and leave her fingerprints in the freshly painted oily coating. She glances sideways to Armin, where he stands nearer the stern, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his head turned at a crooked angle to better see his brushstrokes in the low light. He works almost as if she is not there. She imagines him leaving not long after dinner, retreating here after the day's work had ended and the sun had set; she does not remember seeing him go tonight, but she knows she had thought, briefly, about following him once she'd noticed that he had left. But she had been too slow to make up her mind before the wine had been poured before her. She stayed, and she told herself she would find him here to say goodnight. 

"No," she answers. Her fingers stay threaded in her scarf. "Not everyone."

He guides his brush carefully along a stripe in the wood and does not respond. No more words between them, but somehow, the air feels thick with conversation, like the oil, like honey. Mikasa takes her time circling the vessel where it is balanced above her head, the mast folded askew inside the craft. The tips of each end nearly reach the roof of the tent, the yearning wood stretched and carved and sanded down to achieve the most minuscule detail. She can't help but admire the craftsmanship as she comes around to the other side of the boat; it may be only a small vessel, at least compared to the steamboats she has seen, but it is the handcrafted result of months of labor— every night since they have come to the shore, Armin has retreated here and broken his hands over the sailboat. Mikasa recognizes some of the familiar lines in the wood, the peculiar grains of the planks she once held in place as he worked tirelessly with hot water and glue and a hand-built frame to guide and warp each piece of wood perfectly into place to form the hull. More nights than not, she has found herself retreating here too, after dinner, after meetings, after long days of infiltration plots and weapons training, when the reverence of old-fashioned handiwork seems the only thing worth allowing into her tired mind. 

She comes to the other side of the boat, opposite Armin, until she can see only his legs, his knees bent as he paints in silence. Outside of his watchful eye, something juvenile rises in her again and this time she holds back a smile as she allows herself to reach out and touch the amber sheen of the boat where the oil has already dried. It's smooth and slides easily beneath her touch, shimmering beneath the lantern light like something precious. 

Mikasa finds it almost impossible to dream of building such a thing by her own hand— not as though she could not do it if it was asked of her, but rather, she does not think she could take it upon herself to see it through from beginning to end. It has been a punishing process, she knows from observation; the course of trial and error, of misplaced nails and imprecise angles, of many long nights alone in this tent, laboring over something the others do not understand. Now, it seems it is nearly finished, and though the result is beautiful, she finds the end of the thing sitting uncomfortably within her— all that time, all that work, gone forever, and for a boat that may only sail once. Its construction has been her measure of time in their short months on the seashore. Now the craft is nearly done, and so is their encampment. They will be gone soon, sailing away on a ship to a different land. The finality of everything seems to loom over her like the sailboat, like a storm cloud lingering on the horizon. The day is approaching when they will leave these shores behind, and somehow, though it is the day they have longed for all these years, the end of one long journey and the start of another, the thought worries her. 

His next question comes suddenly: "Did they talk about anything else after dinner?"

His voice is muffled by the boat between them. Mikasa pulls her hand back, letting the pads of her fingers fall from the smooth wood.

"No," she answers. "Hange and Levi went down to the port to talk to the engineers. But the rest of us stayed and played dice. We went through several bottles of wine." 

She hears him hum, something like a laugh, and then his boots shuffle on the sandy carpet as he bends to his knees and appears on the floor beneath the boat, his brush tracing its path to the underside of the hull. Mikasa follows suit, crouching to her knees until she can see his face, almost secluded in the secret darkness found beneath. Their eyes meet under the belly of the hull, where they sit on either side, watching each other.

Armin raises his eyebrow at her. "Sounds like fun."

Mikasa purses her lips to hold back a smirk; he does too, though he's not able to hide it as well. Such fun that neither of them could be bothered to stay with the others and enjoy themselves on one of their last nights off. He turns his attention back to the boat, brushing the oil along the wood above his head in careful strokes. She settles into the silence, pulling her legs up in front of herself to rest her arms across her knees. She sits for a while and watches him work, neither of them speaking, neither of them needing to. A few times, she thinks she can hear the noises of the outside world creeping in: the song of drunken sailors stumbling back to the port, or the aching yawn of the midnight watch rising from their beds to take watch over the cliffs. Each time, she lets herself hold her breath, listen closely for the signs of something drawing too close to their silence; each time, it disappears, and she sinks further into herself, her chin resting on her arms and her eyes beginning to fall shut, to close as the long night draws overhead and the warmth inside the tent begins to intoxicate her. 

He has painted halfway around the underside of the boat when he breaks the silence again, half an hour, maybe more, by reaching around to his supplies at the foot of the stern and producing a dusty green bottle that he hands to her, uncorked, after he takes a swallow and grimaces to himself. Mikasa takes it, though she has never been one for rum, nor red wine; either way, she takes the bottle and she drinks, not even a mouthful, but enough to taste the sugar, the sickly sweetness that she smelled earlier when she stepped inside. It burns her throat on the way down, and she manages to keep a stoic face even as she shoves the bottle back to Armin with the silent insistence to never offer it to her again. 

He sets it aside with a smile, half a hum; that seems to fade, suddenly, and his face is taciturn when he asks her next, "Have you packed yet?" 

Mikasa stretches her arms across each other and leans them on her knees. "No. Not yet."

"It seems a tall order," he says without looking over at her. "Besides the clothes we've been given, I haven't a clue what to put in my bag."

She thinks of the skirts and jackets folded in the trunk beneath her cot— all dark colors and stiff pleats; none of them quite fit, not tailored but borrowed, and none of them feel familiar: a strange round hat and uncomfortable shoes with a block on the heel, not to mention the frankly bizarre undergarments she has already decided not to figure out how to wear. New clothes are all she needs for a reconnaissance mission, she supposes. In that sense, her bags have already been packed for her. 

She glances back to Armin; the shadow of the boat shrouds half his face as he works. She hesitates another moment before asking, "What are you most looking forward to?" 

He does not answer her at first. He stays at his work, his gaze intent on his brush, back and forth along the grain of the wood. But she thinks she sees his hand slow, as his mind begins to wander, to ponder, and the wheels overtake his thoughts, spinning faster as he thinks of the outside world and all that comes with it. What a wide question she has posed to him— of all the things he has dreamed of and all the things he has never even dared to imagine: of all of that, what would he most like to see once they leave the island? She thinks it must be a question she has asked him before, and one to which she has received a different answer every time, always enthusiastic, always full of knowledge and spirit and a longing for something more beyond the walls of the sea that keep them from the world. 

But he hesitates now— and she thinks, not because he is no longer pining to see the wonders of the world, but perhaps because they know now that wonders are few and far between. There will be beauty on the other side of the sea. But there will be pain, too. Confusion. Suffering. Answers to their questions that only spur more questions. The world is no longer the fantasy either of them dreamed of, not after the stories they have heard: from the volunteers, from the prisoners, from memories. It seems almost impossible to reconcile the dream with reality. 

Armin says softly, "I don't know." 

He hesitates another moment before continuing, his head tilted up into the shadows as he paints.

"I suppose I'm looking forward to everything," he says, his voice lighter as he gives her a platitude, a non-answer. "Even after all we've learned, there's still so much of the world that we know nothing about. There is so much out there waiting. I think even the streets of Marley will be alien to us. Like another world entirely, although— one that I don't know if we belong to."

He moves his brush back and forth, before continuing to add, "I guess that's all I can say for now. There's so much to look forward to, but— it seems lately all I can think about is what will happen if we fail. And everyday that prospect seems more likely than it was the day before. 

"If it's true what we've been told," he says, without pause or preface, "if it's true that's the way the world feels about Eldians, and us most of all, the island devils, then I don't know if I want to imagine the avenues available to us. We've heard so much— been told so much, but— really— we've yet to see it with our own eyes. And I know there are so many who have sacrificed so much to get us to this point, and I know we should trust our friends and our allies, and I know there is no reason not to hope, but some part of me can't help but think— if we fail, what roads will be left to follow?" 

His brush moves across the wood, the only sound in the silence that follows— one, two, three times, quickly, before he glances back to her. His face tenses when he looks at her, the pensiveness bruising away into thought lines and a frown, his eyes growing a little wider when he meets her eyes. Mikasa looks back at him. Something twists inside her chest: the distinct feeling of unease, the one she has had all too often lately, increasingly in the last year, almost never-ending since they have come to the seashore, the feeling that she is never quite sure how to pin down or who to blame for. She stares back at him. She opens her mouth to say something, almost, but Armin shakes his head and looks away.

"Sorry," he says.

He turns his face up towards the boat as he begins painting again. The lantern light shines on his profile, and she can see the uneasy smile on his lips, the tell of discomfort, of saying something he should not have, not even to her. "There'll be another way, even if not everything works out the way we want. There's always another way." 

Mikasa sits with the taste of rum on her tongue— bitter sugar. She watches him paint, his face turned away from her again. She folds into herself, knees curling up to her chest, and she lets her head drop until her lips are buried in the scarf wrapped around her neck. The silence is still and uneasy between them, and she thinks she can hear the wind outside. But it never grows louder than a whisper, never more than a pulsing in her ears keeping her on edge. 

"That's not the question you asked anyways," Armin says after another moment. "What am I most looking forward to?"

He pauses again. She watches as his brush runs dry of oil. He sweeps it across the wood anyways, again, a futile movement as he thinks, comes up with something to say, to pad the strange feeling in the air and fill the silence with something. He dips the brush back into the oil and purses his lips before he speaks. 

"Well," he starts. "I wonder what it's like to be out there on the open sea with no land on the horizon. I still haven't got the grasp on navigation, no matter how many times the engineers explain it to me. And I wonder what we'll see in Marley— what it will really be like, besides what we already know. The maps that Yelena brought us show mountains along the coast. Not like the ones here, not white and sandy. Onyankopon says they're what remains of the ancient cliffs that were there long before the cities. They're made from igneous rock— volcanic rock, grown out of the ocean. Beyond that, there's a desert. The dunes are said to stretch inland for miles, all along the northern border..."

He names the places they used to dream about— once, a wish; now, a list of tasks to fulfill, a rote memorization to measure their breaths and remind them of all the things they will lose if they fail. There will be answers overseas. There must be.

Armin continues talking, fantasizing, and Mikasa lets him indulge her in the stories from their childhood, embellished now by world geography lessons and sepia photographs the volunteers have saved from their homelands: pink salt flats that stretch for hundreds of miles and reflect the patterns of the stars at midnight; rainforests, a kind of deep, humid wood with thousands of creatures they've never even dreamed to imagine; stark snowy cliffs in the north, where the sun never sets in the summer; and golden beaches with turquoise water at the center of the world that have never seen a day of frost. He tells her more as he continues to paint, shuffling cross legged beneath the boat as the stripes of oil dry over their heads and the night grows deeper, darker. He tells her, but maybe, she thinks, he is telling himself, practicing an escape on his tongue that will carry him away, at least for a little while— like the boat, like the bottle of rum that she accepts again when he offers it to her, despite knowing how much it will hurt on the way down.

She can taste him on the lip of the rum bottle— his words, his breath. He keeps talking, even when neither of them are sure that she is listening anymore. Mikasa lets the sugary alcohol tingle her throat, her tongue, lets the pleasurable heat flood through her body as she sits back, shuffling around to lean against the table on which the stern of the sailboat rests, the amber oil seeping into the wood that looms over both of their heads. At times, the stroke of his brush is the only thing she can hear. It echoes in her ears, a slow and simple rhythm that begins to lull her to sleep as the flames of the candles grow lower, flickering a show of orange shadows across the inside of the tent. She sits with her back to the table and her hands in lap, comfortably numb as the rum finds its way through her blood. Contented heat settles into her like a lullaby; she feels as if she could fall asleep there on the carpet beneath the boat, her eyes fluttering shut, and the warmth of Armin's body radiating towards her as he finishes the last of the painting, silent again when the stroke of his brush oils the final untouched swatch of wood. 

It's his touch that stirs her awake again. She does not know if she truly fell asleep, or if she simply lost herself in the night once more, as she has found herself prone to doing as of late. But she feels his shoulder brush against hers, and when she blinks, the lantern light has fallen so low that it is nearly black inside the tent; and Armin is sitting beside her, their bodies next to each other in the darkness.

She shifts to turn her face to him. He sits with his head back, and his eyes closed, his tired hands collapsed in his lap with his legs stretched out before them. the empty jar of oil sitting at his heel. Mikasa's heart starts when she looks at him. An expression so drawn and weary lies on his face that she wonders if he has crumpled to sleep immediately upon finishing his work. She thinks, she should leave him, blow out the candles and let him rest, or perhaps scoop him over her shoulder and carry him gently to bed, to lay him down on his cot and let him sleep until morning, until the bags under his eyes begin to fade, until he wakes with a smile on his face and she can see daylight in his eyes again. But before she can move at all, or maybe because she takes too long to decide, Armin's eyes flutter open— a deep blue reflecting the faint candlelight. He stares for a moment at the shining wood that stretches out over them. Then, sensing her gaze, he drops his head forward and turns to look at her, their faces only inches apart.

"I hope I didn't wake you," he says simply. "I finished painting. You looked so comfortable here, I wanted to join you."

"You didn't," Mikasa answers softly. "I don't think I was asleep."

"What if I said you were snoring?"

"I don't snore," she murmurs, though she has to smile. She is certain, either way, that Armin would be too polite to mention it unless she pressed him. Something girlish inside her does not want him to say anymore.

He turns his head back to the boat above them. "It's late. We should go to bed. We're wasting candlelight. But— tomorrow morning, the oil should have dried. I'm going to take her out, see if she'll actually sail.

"But—" he turns back to her. "Would you want to come with me?" 

Mikasa presses her lips together. She smiles at him, though she is tired. "Alright."

Armin smiles back— a fleeting upturn at the corners of his lips that she might have missed in the darkness if she was not already fixated on him. He echoes her word, _alright_ , a soft whisper on his tongue, and though they know they should say goodnight and head to their beds, they sit there beneath the boat for a moment longer, their shoulders touching as they close their eyes and let the rest of the world carry on outside, safe inside their understanding silence. 

**Author's Note:**

> there's this image of you that i can't shake  
> that day we drove out to the ocean.  
> so many things i wanted to say,  
> but i knew it was all [in vain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTXL-cQpwAk).


End file.
